1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the discovery of application dependencies and, more particularly, to the discovery of network application dependencies.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current enterprise networks and modern data centers consist of mixtures of heterogeneous applications and services that are interleaved with each other in a complicated manner. Such applications and services include DNS (Domain Name System), active directory, email and authentication. Specifically, each service may support multiple applications and a particular application may rely on many different services. Moreover, each application itself usually has multiple components, some of which may be used by multiple applications. Understanding and identifying components and the interdependencies of each application is important for a wide spectrum of system management tasks, such as system monitoring, anomaly detection and diagnosis, system upgrading and patching, and application isolation and migration.